In Defense of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom”

I loved Emily Nussbaum’s negative review of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series, “The Newsroom,” which had its première last Sunday night, but I also enjoyed the show—certainly more than she did—and, afterwards, I felt a kind of moviegoer’s chagrin. Movie audiences get very little dialogue this snappy; they get very little dialogue at all. In movies we are starved for wit, for articulate anger, for extravagant hyperbole—all of which pours in lava flows during the turbulent course of “The Newsroom.” The ruling gods of movie screenwriting, at least in American movies, are terseness, elision, functional macho, and heartfelt, fumbled semi-articulateness. Some of the very young micro-budget filmmakers, trying for that old Cassavetes magic (which was never magical for me, but never mind) achieve a sludgy moodiness with minimal dialogue, or with improvisation—scenes that can be evocative and touching. But the young filmmakers wouldn’t dream of wit or rhetoric. It would seem fake to them. Thank heavens the swelling, angry, sarcastic, one-upping talk in “The Newsroom” is unafraid of embarrassing anyone.

Visiting a university, Sorkin’s hero, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), a cable-news anchor who has gone soft, lets loose with a disgusted tirade that some people have compared to the anchor Howard Beale’s explosion in “Network.” I’m sorry, nostalgia can only go so far: Aaron Sorkin has a much better ear and a wittier tongue than Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Network.” McAvoy’s tirade is not some inchoate outburst of generalized rage like Beale’s, rather it’s a complaint about American mediocrity with very specific numbers and figures and a bitter, ironic edge. When McAvoy then shifts gears and talks about the good old days in news—as if the decline in network news were responsible for American troubles—Sorkin loses focus, but up until then the writing is terrific, and Daniels delivers the rant with a rancorous Olbermannish hyper-precision that we decide (correctly) is produced by self-disgust. This rant is not merely a noisy lecture; it’s part of a dramatic characterization.

So, yes, there is speechifying in “The Newsroom,” which has vexed critics, but that’s hardly all that there is—and even some of the speeches, in context, make perfect sense. This first episode is devoted to the re-awakening of the sour-stomached, egotistical McAvoy. After his meltdown, he gets unwillingly saddled with a new executive producer, MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), an old girlfriend, and the two have a long argument in which she says such things as “there’s nothing that’s more important in democracy than a well-informed electorate. When there is no information or, much worse, wrong information, it can lead to calamitous decisions that clobber any attempts at vigorous debate. That’s why I produce the news.” Pompous? Not in context. The two have reached a crisis point: he has lost it, and she, after exhausting years of reporting from war zones, has nowhere else to go. She’s trying to save her career and argue the reluctant McAvoy back into the game with the kind of standard argument that they once believed in. She’s saying (in effect) that those clichés became clichés because they once defined shared ideals, and that they can get back to those ideals. Both of them know she’s making a speech, and his answer is curtly ironic and (at that point) dismissive. But, it turns out, Mac’s speech has an effect.

The rest of the show can hardly be called a rant. Much of the episode is a very shrewdly written series of minor power plays and exchanges among McAvoy’s staff as they jockey for position, try to decide whether to leave him for another anchor, and so on. Sorkin is a master of this kind of rapid-patter elbowing and turf-defending (“The West Wing” was filled with it). “The Newsroom” is devoted to many kinds of conversation, large-scale and small, and then, abruptly, it gets down to serious work. The episode is set on April 20, 2010, the day of the Deepwater Horizon explosion off the coast of Louisiana. The squabbling gets pushed aside. The curmudgeonly McAvoy rouses himself; his cranky bullying turns purposeful, and the episode becomes a hard-driving (and very entertaining) procedural about putting a breaking story on the air.

Dismissing the show, the media critic Howard Kurtz has complained that people don’t talk this way in newsrooms. No, they don’t. And they didn’t talk in actual newsrooms they way they did in the Hecht-MacArthur newspaper farce, “The Front Page,” or in all its many iterations (including the wisecracking classic “His Girl Friday”). And people in small towns didn’t talk the way they did in satirical Preston Sturges farces like “Hail the Conquering Hero.” Kurtz is being densely literal-minded. Sorkin fits into the glorious tradition of those classic Hollywood screenwriters. His kind of aggressively heightened talk, when it’s good, is commonly called entertainment, even art. Realism isn’t the issue.

Aaron Sorkin writes a highly stylized dialogue which depends on certain conventions that he has made his own. First, there is the convention of perfect articulacy: everyone says exactly what he means, and without hesitation. Second, Sorkin unabashedly reveres high intelligence. Whether it’s the President and his men and women in “The West Wing” or Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” or Billy Beane in “Moneyball,” Sorkin celebrates the guy (ambivalently in “The Social Network”) who cuts through the crap, gets to the point, sees the patterns and implications buried within some matter. A lot of his writing consists of people questioning each other—sifting, correcting, overturning—as part of a furious drive toward a conclusion. He writes interrogation scenes without pedantry, in a spirit of high gaiety—getting to the truth of something is an adventure.

He has also developed a dramatically entertaining idea of how dynamic groups work together. In “The West Wing” the product was policy; in “The Social Network” it was an entrepreneurial idea. Here, it’s a good news show. Life may not work this way in the real world, but Sorkin’s complaint about America is that intelligence is in a semi-apologetic retreat, while emotionalism and stupidity are on the rise—in public policy and in the media. He’s setting up an ideal. He is an ethical writer—a moralist, if you like. He’s neither ironic nor self-deprecating; he dislikes that part of our derisive culture which undercuts, as a ritual form of defense, any kind of seriousness. He’s a very witty entertainer who believes that there’s a social value in truth. I don’t think this belief should be confused, as it has been recently, with self-righteousness.

Photograph by Melissa Moseley/HBO/AP Photo.

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.